


Happiness is easy

by Siera_Writes



Series: Life's what you make it [2]
Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, I wouldn't say it's too graphic, Spoilers, Urban Magic AU, demon!wesley
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-10
Updated: 2015-05-10
Packaged: 2018-03-29 21:45:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,115
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3911776
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siera_Writes/pseuds/Siera_Writes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Fisk is twelve, he kills his father, lets the sprays of blood so hot and vivid coat his skin and baptise him  into sin. He will later tell himself he feels nothing but dispassion, empty, void, a blank slate reminiscent of the wall in varying whites he's observed so much. </p><p>It's so much easier if you lie.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Happiness is easy

**Author's Note:**

> A few people said they were interested, so here we go. Enjoy.

When Fisk is twelve, he kills his father, lets the sprays of blood so hot and vivid coat his skin and baptise him into sin. He will later tell himself he feels nothing but dispassion, empty, void, a blank slate reminiscent of the wall in varying whites he's observed so much. 

It's so much easier if you lie. 

He knows the wall's every barren inch, the varying tones and blandness that make the whole. Might hate it if he could clear the cloying rage from his consciousness.

But he's twelve and he just killed his dad and his mother watches on, and oh, he hates his father, it's a burning torrent incandescent within him, and he just keeps bringing the bloodied head of the hammer down, down into the pulp and the gore, the off-white chips and fragments. It's almost mechanical, methodical and relaxing. 

The copper-salt smell invades his nose, tingles on his tongue where it trespassed while he was screaming. The crunching and slopping sigh every impact of the mangled carcass makes him shiver involuntarily.

His mother has to stop him. She hugs Wilson, light smattering of perfume clouding his overwrought senses and catching in his throat, and all he sees is the wall, the vague space, and he just stares. He wonders. At his life. About his parents. What he ever did to deserve this. People think he's a pushover, that he's stupid. In some ways, they're right.

But Wilson knows things. Can sense it - intentions, emotions, personality. Fleeting, feather-like on the breeze of aura and interaction. But it's there.

Probably why the loathing filled him so utterly - it radiated from his father like light from the sun; just as burning and ruthless. 

He's left empty of emotion, though, as soon as what little a remaining soul Bill Fisk had, has slipped slickly into the ether. It feels like nails scraping down his back. Wilson is once again a vessel ready for the taking. He already understands there is more at play in this world, more than just petty politics and monetary gain. There are things that walk the shadows and stalk the city for their prey. Fragments of the Devil skulk amongst them - he should know, he's felt them enough. Stays as far from those people as he can, unless it's his father. He has no choice then. His father never let religion into their lives, but Wilson cannot deny the reality of what he feels.

But Bill Fisk is gone now. Violently deceased. His mother is with him, and she's alright (hurting so much, Wilson barely holds her soul at bay) and she knows what to do. Everything will be okay.

They take the body down to the river in manageable chunks - Fisk realises the irony of this later, that his father didn't get how to break things into small enough sections to deal with them efficiently - but all the twelve-year-old can think of is the silkiness of the water, dark as jet and just as glossy, capped with the occasional white ridge, and encrusted with a plethora of golden points from the city's lights. It helps to block the reels of imagery and snippets of screaming trying their hardest to continue torturing him, to emboss themselves into his brain.

He loves this city.

\---

Wilson learns just how good life can be, secreted away at the farm. Loves it, even as the draw of the city buzzes at the base of his skull. 

It's difficult to explain to others, let alone himself, why he wants to go back. Even more painful, torturous, to voice it to his mother. Her eyes, he can see her soul chipping away in the increasingly glassy mirrors as he asks (begs) to return. In a twisted way, he is glad of her acuity and awareness fading away. It makes it easier to get her to accept the choice when she's so weakened and split.

Besides, he knows exactly how to fix that city, shape it and sculpt it with an artist's hand, use the aspects and benefits of the criminal elements, but use them to improve and armour it. To prompt progress. The end result glitters in his mind's eye, jewel-like. He might have to make sacrifices, but he can bear those burdens with the bulky build he was once mocked for.

If anything, he's the most qualified for this immense task. He's felt the cruelty and resentment that can be so easily bred in the city.

But first, Wilson knows that he needs to educate himself, to become more aware and able of the behaviour and culture of others, to cultivate a patience and calm within himself. He won't receive the respect he expects from others any other way.

\---

In Asia, his taste for the new, the extraordinary, is reinforced. He learns the multitude of tongues, and though compared to the residents of each country, his mastery is rudimentary at most, it lends him many benefits. They overlook him, see him as the manifestation of the West. He just smiles, replies slowly but coherently, watches as realisation dawns slow on their faces. Thankfully, most are polite, almost painstakingly so.

He learns a lot from them. Builds his appreciation for fine teas, clothes, and foods. Enjoys the picturesque. The only thing he can't develop is meditation. His brain won't quiet, incessant, thoughts at constant boil and frothing into the front of his conscious. Trying to seal them up makes it worse. He gives up on that method of holding his emotions at bay quite quickly.

But Wilson gladly accepts this new facet of himself, augmented and new, and sees the myriad of extra roads that are now open and offered to him.

He finds the people there interesting and varied, their souls much the same as those in the city he remembers most, yet their veneers of hospitality are so much more honed and refined. He loves the complicated overlaps and politics of it all. Sees his greater plan as being much the same.

There is an old woman in one of the villages that he stays in. She accepts his occasionally halting or stilted speech, recognises it not as inability or inadequacy, but as the struggle it really is for Wesley. The hunt for the right phrasing, wording, the fight to keep other thoughts back. She steps close to him one day, while they sip tea, and presses a small jet rock into his hands. A frisson runs down his spine, excitement more than the feeling of cracked nails like his father's soul, and Wilson feels the power trapped within.

It's smooth, well thumbed and worn sleek. Symbols, runes more like, are etched into each of its eight irregularly sized faces. A tattered leather loop is attached with an elegant blued-silver cradle that is looped through a small hole in the stone.

Wilson is lost for words, English or otherwise, mouth agape, wondering how she knew. She just clasps his hands between hers, looks deep into his eyes, imploring, and somehow he knows he's made a promise, agreed to what she said, though he knows not what it is.

She tells him to wear it, not to take it off or damage it in any way, not even the flimsy material clutching around his neck. She pauses, a shuddering breath, then adds, voice quiet, that if in danger, he can make a compromise, but at a cost. 

He already knows the cost. He's well-versed in the transaction of souls.

\---

Just as Wilson entered, Fisk leaves Asia for his city without a backwards glance.

\---

It's more difficult than he'd realised. To make yourself more than a man, into a symbol. He starts small - has to - but builds his business slowly and surely into a vaulted empire, encompassing the city.

It almost never was though. He's new to the scene, young, inexperienced, though years older than some he is in competition with. He believes so strongly in his coruscating vision for the city, though, that it has to become material and tangible. He practically wills it into being. 

Maybe the necklace has something to do with it.

\---

On his thirty-sixth birthday, a human trafficking ring decides they've had enough of the stupid prematurely-balding man who is uncannily encroaching on their trade.

Fisk wakes up screaming, not from the eternal haunting of his one dream, but from the feeling of knives ripping through his flesh and pulling at the scarlet liquid that runs through his physical body. The hatred and sheer sadistic pleasure in his captor's souls stuns him into a prey-like bolt for freedom. The pain is too much. Laughter echoes harshly in the crate they're trapped in, metal unmoving where Fisk's sprawled over the ridged floor. The pain is near insurmountable. He can feel his soul slipping, brain becoming fuzzy and vision skewing.

He's almost dead, he knows that. They've targeted major arteries, the blood spurting from them intense red and livid. They're going for the most painful but quickest death through blood-loss they can manage. His hands are cold, seem distant and detached from his physicality.

He can barely push himself up, slips down again, sending a shock of pain through him while they jeer. His throat is raw from desperate cries.

He knows what he has to do. He reaches, slowly, oh so slowly, to his neck, hand shaking and erratic at his throat. Hooks numb fingers through, feeling the resistance of the leather band. Pulls with all the might he can summon.

It feels like a waterfall, when it breaks, swirling and violent but undoubtedly beautiful, stunning. A shadowy maw flickering and swirling black around him as it eviscerates the adversaries around him, leaving mangled corpses in its wake. 

Fisk still clutches the charm in a cold palm. That's the only reason he's still alive, he guesses.

A silence ticks by, light from outside on the docks flickering. The dark in the container coalesces slowly into the shape of a man, still wholly pitch black, no detail to it whatsoever. Like a shadow become real. The edges still blur and flicker.

Fisk gets the feeling it's smiling. He can feel it. Like a soul but not quite. Vast.

It crouches, extends an ethereal hand to him. He can barely lift his hand at this point. A voice echoes, dark, heavy and amused, cloying in his slipping brain. "Do we have an agreement?" The chuckle rumbles in his brain with Fisk's slight nod of assent.

He feels darkness envelop him, a twinge from where his soul resides, but not much else. Before he knows it, his whole frame is lifted, a vision no doubt ridiculous if any had seen it, and carried away. He blacks out, but feels comfortable, confident, in the shade's abilities.

\---

Fisk wakes, night terror just abating, wounds entirely healed, feels more vitality than he has done in a while. He imagines that the evening must have been a dream. He slips a hand up to his neck to check for any sign of a scar or slit in the skin. There is nothing, and the necklace sits as it would usually.

His brow furrows in consternation and confusion. He feels a bit further around the necklace, to check for breaks, finds a knot where there once was none. His eyes widen, stares through the glass of his apartment as he tries to force his brain to recall the events of the previous night in as best detail as possible. His hand drops to his lap.

He eventually figures that the best thing for it is to proceed with his day as he usually would. He makes the only breakfast he can with his thought processes in tatters. He finds the process relaxing, and gives his brain the opportunity to just run while he tries to compute why happened. The omelette rests obligingly on his plate. 

He's practically half-way through his breakfast, when he hears dress-shoe heels clicking lightly on the marble floor of the apartment. He looks up from his meal, unsettled, as a man strides smartly into the room. Fisk knows exactly who (what) he is. The man is tall - his height - but slimmer, sharper in appearance, with hair so black, it's jet, and danger thinly veiled under a cloak of faux-humanity. The flatness of his eyes beneath his glasses, and the cruelty of his smile, are the only tells of the thing's more-than-humanness. "Hello, Mr Fisk. I'm James Wesley." His voice is less distorted than the previous night, but still the same commanding register. He seems unflustered, unflappable, sangfroid even. All he can sense from the spectre is ambition to match his own.

Fisk can't help but smile.


End file.
